Saturday, June 20, 2026

Chickens in world literature: the pecking catastrophe

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Poultry are not constantly awesome, but they appear harmless. He is extremely nervous and shakes his head so ridiculously that it is simple to skip. There are 4 periods additional chickens than folks in the environment, amongst 30 and 40 billion, most of them in agonizing confinement and pretty limited. The only animals that can be thought of lucky are individuals that are identified as “putt, putt, putt.”

Claw marks in culture

A creature that has accompanied gentleman given that time immemorial, the hen has left several deep claw marks and some feathers on the crop. The day-to-day and culinary relevant to the rooster, the hen and the egg dominate the tradition, but the metaphorical demand of the domestic bird ought to not be underestimated. Specially because the most day to day issues, like the legendary fertility of the hen, express a judgment on the stricken inhabitant of fashionable times that someone like Eusebius Chubb in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” can only humbly take:

“Everywhere I seemed there was vegetation. The hens continually laid eggs of no certain colour. Then, with a sigh, he remembered his have fertility and his poor spouse Jane, who was now in the dwelling in the months of her fifteenth delivery, and questioned how he could blame the birds. The entire dome of heaven was nothing at all far more than an enormous mattress of feathers and there he imitated the indiscriminate fertility of the back garden, the bed room and the hen coop: he entered the property, caught his head in the fuel stove, and when they uncovered him he could no longer resuscitate.

Fragment of “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf

If a rooster appears in the textual content, it threatens disaster. If there are numerous, it gets even worse. Writers as assorted as Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bulgakov, Marcel Proust, Wilhelm Busch, Elias Canetti, and Daniil Charms share this conviction.

Contemplating about the chicken and egg problem

Rolf Cantzen was not frightened by the mom hen’s method to loss of life and damage, nor by Christian Morgenstern’s warning tune about “the Fingurs and their people”, which commences with a “Nachtalp-Henne”.

That manuscript You can download the application listed here.

Accompanied by cackles and songs about the chook that can rarely fly, he appears to be like into various literary rooster coops all around the earth, ponders the problem of the hen’s egg and shouts his “putt, putt, putt” in the darkness of the libraries, in which, alongside one another to popular domestic chickens and some preventing cocks, jogging and yoga chickens, esoteric chickens, male roosters and relatives hens are up to their seemingly harmless antics.

Frauke Poolman, Monika Oschek, Axel Wandtke and Holger Bülow will communicate
Sound: Thomas Monnerjahn
Directed by Beatrice Ackers
Enhancing: Jörg Plath
Germany radio tradition 2022

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Suzanne Collins
Suzanne Collins
Suzanne Collins is an acclaimed American novelist whose imaginative storytelling has captivated millions of readers worldwide. Best known for The Hunger Games series, she is recognized as one of the most influential voices in contemporary young adult fiction.

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